QVCS Product Family Newsletter - July 2007

Publication date: July 25, 2007

Web Site Updates
QVCS-Enterprise 2.1 Progress
Keyword Expansion Tip
Weblog highlights: Ignoring Sycophants

Web Site Updates

The Quma web site has a new look since the publication of the last newsletter. We hope you like the new look and find the site easier to navigate. In addition to the changes in appearance, the site now also includes the entire QVCS/QVCS-Pro user manual. Other changes include direct links to our e-Commerce provider web pages so that navigation from the 'Buy Now' link on the home page is more direct.

Check it out: http://www.qumasoft.com

and let us know what you think.

QVCS-Enterprise 2.1 Progress

We released a QVCS-Enterprise 2.1 'Technology Preview' back in early June. The contents and purpose of that preview are described in this blog entry.

Work continues to add support for read-write label based views -- the final feature that will make the 2.1 release feature complete.

My latest guess is that QVCS-Enterprise 2.1 will be available in the September timeframe.

Keyword Expansion Tip

I had a recent tech-support issue that was related to the use of keyword expansion. You can read about the use of keywords here.

While the description above is for QVCS/QVCS-Pro, most of the details also apply to QVCS-Enterprise.

The tech-support issue had the following symptom: the QVCS-Enterprise user was seeing intermittent success when trying to checkin a file that had keyword expansion enabled.

When QVCS (both QVCS/QVCS-Pro and QVCS-Enterprise) expands keywords, it opens the workfile for write. If it cannot open the workfile for write, then the requested operation will fail.

For example, suppose you edit a workfile with Microsoft Word and save your changes, but leave the document open within MS Word. If, while the document is open in MS Word, you then try to checkin your changes AND you have keyword expansion enabled for that file, the checkin will fail because MS Word still has the file open, and QVCS will not be able to open the workfile for write.

If you use any kind of editor that has behavior similar to MS Word, the way to checkin your changes is to first make sure that you have closed the file within your editor so that QVCS can successfully open the workfile for write.

Weblog highlights: Ignoring Sycophants

Sometimes you have an insight that spans a number of domains. I'm not a Bill Gates, and unless the version control market gets a LOT bigger, selling QVCS will never take me to those heights. But, that doesn't stop me from speculating on what must be one of the bigger problems players at that level must face: how to get an accurate view of the world. You can read more in this blog entry.